Later on I remember hearing Mort Sahl saying Ike would'a gone down (to Little Rock?) ... if only he knew if he should have used an underhand or overhand grip ... helping this child intergrate into a white school.

Not far from me, on Alhambra Road, is a house (in Alhambra), where I knew Norman Rockwell used to paint. (Back in the 1930's.) So much light! Such big windows. In a studio that's separated from the main house.

It is interesting that these days, school intergration is not seen as the great blessing liberals claimed it would be back in the 60s. Whites fled cities because of the deteriorating education in integrated schools. Hispanics in LA are working hard to get blacks out of their neighborhoods, neighborhood schools and fighting those liberals and blacks that demand "mixed". Jewish groups demanded and got set aside Hasidic schools. Asians now have weekend academies to compensate for time lost in the regular school week to focus on lower academic performing and misbehaving non-Asians.

Even blacks are talking about a need for separate schools for disruptive young black males and gang members.

As for New Orleans blacks....about the lowest educational attainment in the country in the 50 years after the quaint Rockwell painting.

This is B.S. and a complete revisionist history. My dad who grew up in the deep south told me that most people did not want intergration because they did not want the crime that goes with it. Norman Rockwell was just another north eastern liberal who slandered the good people of the south.

The school that was celebrated being integrated and liberated by the "courageous" Ruby Bridges, to show the way to the new American future, William Frantz Elementary, is 99.7% black, reflecting its surrounding demographics. Whites fled.School is in the bottom 2% of Fed testing for elementary schools nationwide. Current talk is of renaming it for an inspiring black leader, or Ruby Bridges herself.

The scab needed picking, then the nasty flesh underneath can get some fresh air and sunshine and heal. We have slipped backwards again as a country the undercurrent of racism has crept back up to the surface again since Obama has been President.Now let's hear the vile insults and denials.

According to the article, it's coming from left field, courtesy of civil rights leaders (the article quotes Michael Meyers) complaining that O is too wishy-washy on civil rights, and is using an old and outdated symbol to make up for his lack of substance.

Pfft, they didn't find anyone who objected to it, just a parade of minor-league pressure-group apparatchiks and art historians all doing their best Miss Drysdale impressions and patting themselves on the back for being so challenged by the work.

The raw truth about America, Cookie, is that that little black girl was being escorted to school by 4 white law men. Imagine the reverse happening. Oh...you can't? Damn right you can't because it never would and never will happen in any black, brown or yellow country.

"Bridges said she had little time to talk with Obama during their meeting but believes he understands and to some degree personifies the message of racial tolerance that she delivers."

Obama wants to be like Lincoln or FDR. You can bet that either of them would have taken the time to talk to Ms. Bridges at some length, out of courtesy but also because they might learn something. Obama is President because of Ms. Bridges and thousands of people like her. When she walked to that school, very few people had heard of Martin Luther King. A multitude of now nameless blacks made King and Obama possible.

It tells me really more than I want to know that Obama passed on the opportunity to have a real conversation with her.

Althouse stated FTR: And it's not that Norman Rockwell is too sentimental/bland/cliché to take seriously?

and Robert Cook said (also FTR):It's a great painting by Rockwell, once of his best, and there was no need for "subtlety," as it expresses a raw truth about America and about human nature. (As true now as then, or ever.)

Much of what Rockwell painted was great. That many contemporary artists find his work sentimental or bland or cliché says as much about their self-loathing as anything else, IMHO.

Exactly Ann, why shouldn't Obama hang such a painting? Who the hell cares if he removed a bust of Churchill? THe uproar over THAT was simply another attempt to demonize him. He has faults and I am often as of late deeply disappointed in his decisions , but to constantly nitpick every damn thing he does only shows that no matter what he does he will be vilified by those who swear he will be a one term President and those who drink that flavor Kool Aid.

the undercurrent of racism has crept back up to the surface again since Obama has been President

Naturally. You put a guy who acts like Jeremiah Wright is inspirational in that office, you're bound to get more racism from the executive branch. Thus the "wise Latina" appointment, the beer summit fiasco, the refusal to prosecute black people at the department formerly known as Justice, etc etc etc.

"We have made great strides, but to deny that racism still exists is not based in reality."

Is it still one-way racism do you think?

Or are we ready, at last, to have an open conversation about our country's past ... and more importantly, our future.

Especially on the issue of education. Our schools today are more segregated than when we were trying honestly to integrate them, and spread the opportunity around to all who were willing to work hard and grasp it themselves.

Let's talk about this, openly and honestly, before the Supreme Court is again forced to take up the issue and consider making life-altering decisions that will affect so many?

If it ain't broken, sure don't fix it. Trouble is, it's broken. Our primary education system, that is.Just hanging a picture isn't going to fix things so easily though, I predict, especially as budgets get more and more tightened.

Interesting painting. I was not aware the Rockwell did this. He did a good job convening an image.

Now, from the article, I would argue that Obama isn't African-American anymore than John Kerry's wife is (she is a Portugues colonial). His biological father was Kenyan, but he is a decendent of slave owners in the US.

Politico reports:“The N-word there — it sure stops you,” said William Kloss, an art historian and expert on the White House collections.

Suppose the graffito had been FUCK SEGREGATION would the art historian hedge and say "The F-word there -- it sure stops you"? Is fuck banned in the White House? Somehow I doubt it.

The painting illustrates a shameful moment in our history, and I suspect it's accurate, if anything it is likely toned down for public consumption. The notion that a seven year old girl would need an escort of four Federal Marshals to attend a public school is the outrageous content, not the image of a scrawled word. This is like fretting over a painting of the Auschwitz crematorium in operation because it shows air pollution being generated. This ginned up controversy over nigger is much like the official de-nazication measures in the German Federal Republic -- Ban the swastika! Ban the stiff-arm salute! Ban the symbols but not the content.

From the accompanying article:Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” installed in the White House last month, shows U.S. marshals escorting Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old African-American girl, into a New Orleans elementary school in 1960 as court-ordered integration met with an angry and defiant response from the white community.

Yet the escorting marshals shown in the painting are white.Desegregation would never have occurred if the "white community" did not support it.

According to the article, it's coming from left field, courtesy of civil rights leaders (the article quotes Michael Meyers) complaining that O is too wishy-washy on civil rights, and is using an old and outdated symbol to make up for his lack of substance.

I don't see anyone criticizing his choice of the painting. Everyone quoted in the article seems positive or at least neutral about the painting. A few people took it as an opportunity to go off on a tangent about where they disagree with Obama on policy, but I wouldn't call that making a fuss over the painting; I'd just say they opportunistically got up on a soapbox to make their usual complaints about Obama.

First, why is there even an article about this? Second, they're acting like it's rather edgy or in-your-face of Obama to have selected this venerable image.

OK, I thought of "fuss" as negative/critical. People often remark on the White House decor and art. Wouldn't you expect a painting like this to draw more earnest commentary than the fact that he chose taupe wallpaper?

We have made great strides, but to deny that racism still exists is not based in reality.

Who is denying that there is racism?

The contention is that it is different than it was in the time of Rockwell's painting.

One of the main differences is that the racism from Blacks towards Whites has become not only apparent but also dangerous. To deny that this type of racism also exists is to be naive at best and stupid at worst.

How old are you applecakes? I'm guessing very young.

why shouldn't Obama hang such a painting? Who the hell cares if he removed a bust of Churchill?

Why indeed not. It is a fabulous piece of art and a powerful statement about the history and times of desegregation.

That you can't see that removing the Churchill bust was a big fat slap in the face to one of the United States long term staunch allies, says quite about about you. Naive is perhaps NOT the term after all.

Maximum Twine wrote:My dad who grew up in the deep south told me that most people did not want intergration because they did not want the crime that goes with it.

Sorry, MT, bullshitter was your father not Norman Rockwell. (You chose to cite your father as your authoritative source, so don't come back at me for "defaming" him, ok?)

I grew up in the South (North Carolina and Maryland) and have Southern parentage on both sides. White Southern racism was real and is real today, though dramatically reduced in only a few generations and mostly confined to the older members of the less, shall we say, philosophical classes. (The most damaging racism in America today resides chiefly in the elite circles of the blue states.) In 1960 white Southerns did not fear black crime. They loathed blacks as dirty and diseased, and despised them as lazy and degenerate. Everyone knew a black person that they personally liked, but if asked about Negroes generally they would report the most loathsome and absurd opinions one could imagine. You need to read up on the subject, and while you're about it read up on anti-semitic racism in Nazi Germany -- the parallels are astounding.

Maguro wrote:Is this true? I had not heard that the Dunhams were of Southern slaveowning stock. Seems like something the media would've noted.Obama's white ancestors were Jayhawkers.Whatever they thought of blacks, the institution of slavery was not popular with whites trying to make a living from a small farm.

From the content of the article I take it that the controversial element is the graffito nigger, which I take to be yet another absurd politically correct tempest in a teapot. The quoted art historian said "...It’s a painting that could not be hung even for a brief time in the public spaces [of the White House], I’m pretty sure of that.”

The real controversy ought to be why Obama is able to display this painting without the kind of opprobrium that the Left would have heaped on George W. Bush for the same action. (Of course Bush did not, nor do I have any evidence that he even contemplated such an action, but I think you know what I mean.)

It's good to have this picture in the Oval Office. When Paul Ryan comes to chat about entitlement programs, he can be photographed sitting under it. Maybe they can can install a burning cross in the Rose Garden to backlight the Republican delegation when they come to visit....The subtext of the painting is that you whites have a lot to feel guilty about, and what makes you think you're not treating Obama like that six year old girl.

Is the painting "controversial"? Did someone say it was, or is that your interpretation?

In any case, any serious history of the civil rights movement must include the political reality that it could not have succeeded without significant white support.

And part of what created that support were the images that Americans saw on their TVs and in magazines, images such as the white toughs threatening the black students who were attempting to enroll at Little Rock Central High School.

The civil rights movement succeeded in no small part because images like this made it all too clear who owned the moral high ground (a clarity that was largely lost by the '70s and later, as what was left of the Movement degenerated into demands for strict proportionality (per disparate impact theory) and all the rest of the racial-spoils residue we're still stuck with).

The problem with the Norman Rockwell painting isn'tthat it's "controversial," it's that images from the actual events do a better and more dramatic job of saying the same things.

Yes, of course. The painting is just a handy pivot to fussing about O's supposed wishy-washiness on civil rights generally. It's what Mickey Kaus says the NY Times loves to do -- X 'calls to mind' Y, a device often used when the reporter wants to score some points against the usual targets and uses X (a topic in the news) as a pivot to Y (some subject deemed useful in bashing the target).

White support for civil rights mutated into white guilt and we are stuck with a half white president who couldn't get this country back to black if he wanted to, and clearly he doesn't. How's that for progress, progressives?

ripic @3:24 "it never would and never will happen in any black, brown or yellow country."

Unfortunately, this is overwhelmingly true. People of all races and religions are still systematically and brutally oppressed around the world. Why is it only predominantly white nations who fight their own native prejudice? Who take civil rights and equality before the law seriously. Yet it is always whites accused of racism around the world, even by avowed racists.

"The school that was celebrated being integrated and liberated by the "courageous" Ruby Bridges, to show the way to the new American future, William Frantz Elementary, is 99.7% black, reflecting its surrounding demographics.Whites fled."

Just in case no one has mentioned it... other things happened at the same time.

I've had someone argue (on the internet) to me that church schools are blatantly and inherently racist because the establishment of church schools was a direct answer to desegregation.

Yet, in the same time frame God and prayer were taken out of public schools. Would not the establishment of religious academies most likely be in response to a religious situation?

Nor is choosing a local alternative (a newly established parochial school) in order to avoid busing the same thing as doing so in order to avoid desegregation.

A false, outdated political metaphor that is unintentionally ironic in a tragic way. Integration across the board, affecting staff as well as students was achieved but came with some inadvertent side effects for some communities.

Once race became the dominate hiring and human resource factor, competence took second place and it apparently takes only a bit of this to tip the scale toward disaster. Then – Pow! Reality intrudes. Atlanta is a case in point.

I think it is entirely likely that Blacks today would be getting a better education if school were never desegregated. There is a lack of responsibility taken when your kids are being educated by the state with everybody else. If we had neighborhood schools serving their own populations, I think they would take performance and outcome more personally.

Of course this is an argument more against centralized schooling, but that's an integral part of desegregation.

We have slipped backwards again as a country the undercurrent of racism has crept back up to the surface again since Obama has been President.

I see no evidence this is true. The Democrats would love for it to be true, since it means more goodies for reliable voting blocks. But things are probably okay when you have people like Ed Schultz making up racism because he can't find any of the real stuff.

I went to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge on my way to a weekend of Silent Meditation and Yoga at the Berkshires. I didn't talk that weekend but did do some guy in the Sauna.

The museum is very rustic and quaint and delish. And Stockbridge, what can one say?

I purchased my mom a plate of the Thanksgiving Dinner pic and she puts sausage on it during the holidays.

I never go anywhere near the south. I am scared. I drove from Boston to New Orleans once and the experience was life changing. South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi. So awful, so poor, so depressed, so uneducated and so obese...and they all smoke and are pregnant and smoke while being pregnant. I would drive by shacks and say to my friend, there is noway someone actually lives there. I was driving a fabulous Black BMW with Massachusetts plates. Thank God I don't believe in bumper stickers because I probably would of chosen something like, "Married in Mass". I am sure that would go over real well.

I believe the South is actually fatter than Wisconsin. And you couldn't swing a cat without hitting some General Lee car with a confederate flag on it.

What does a fag do there? Probably hide, commit suicide or go to Marcus Bachmann's school for the gay.

HOw old was Marlon Brando when Tennessee Williams wanted him in Streetcar?

What's the "electricity?"

So many people want to be stars.

But how many people actually have that charisma?

No. I haven't watched the current "show." My last time "in" was with JFK. I didn't even pay that much attention to Reagan. (Only later did I realize how bright he was. And, I think my favorite book about him is the one where he learned everything while at GE.)

Nope. Never saw any of his movies.

And, only now do I realize what a powerhouse Nancy Reagan really IS! Reagan knew two powerful women. One. His wife. And, the other Margaret Thatcher.

Well? Roosevelt had Churchill.

While Obama? I think he can win by playing "the schlemiel." And, I think the press will keep reporting that the race is very, very close. Because it suits them.

It's like selling lottery tickets ... the more people who buy into the gamble ... the higher up goes the prize.

Rockwell (and family) spent many years in New Rochelle, New York - where he employed local girls as models - often from nearby NRHS. He would never replicate their faces, to avoid additional payments. So, it would be a leg here, a nose there, an eye, a pair of lips, this one's hair, that one's feet, and so on.

His work was also heavily influenced by where he lived, one of the most idyllic neighborhoods in New Rochelle - or anywhere for that matter; houses bordering on mansions, with massive, well-kept trees, and lawns as soft as plush, green velvet.

The specific area was locally known as Beechmont, and from every elevated, sheltered window the world below appeared perfect.

It was southern Conservatives who wrote Jim Crow laws and did their best to keep African Americans from becoming full members of society. It was southern Conservatives who fillibustered the Civil Rights Act. It was northern Conservatives who gave them all cover in racist editorials in the pages of National Review. And it was these same racist southern Conservatives who were greeted with open arms by the Republican Party after a Democrat signed those civil rights bills. Why don't Conservatives ever apologize for this?